This note accompanies “Family of Things,” a solo exhibition featuring recent work by Edmond Praybe at SFFA Main Street Gallery. On view May 2- May 31, 2025.
Phil Geiger is a sneaky painter. I mean that in the best sense of the phrase. He gently draws you closer with the quiet approachability of his subjects - a woman on a bed, a group of figures seated on a table, a recognizable street view - and the seeming ease of the composition and then, once you’re invested in the scene, you’re hit with their presence as paintings, as painted objects. Here, ‘seeming ease’ is the key because, much like Matisse, the ease is not that of the first strike, but of the feeling of inevitability that comes from well-considered, hard-fought painting decisions made over time, gradually inching things into their proper place. The sneakiness is that these ‘realist’ paintings are just as much about the beauty of paint and color as they are about the images that the paint represents. A white table is not just a flat unmodulated plane of whitish tone, but a carefully keyed arrangement of kaleidoscopic colors that comes together to register in our eyes as a ‘whitish table.’ A warm, seemingly translucent lamp light is a slab of orangey peach paint and the cool shadow of a face a beautifully pitched blue gray.
The color and the surface sing in Phil’s paintings. The way he handles the paint builds form. Moving rapidly in hatches against the contour of a figure or in a bold swipe following the edge of an arm, the touch sculpts. Light pervades the scenes, but rather than dissolving things into the atmosphere, it becomes the catalyst to structure the volumes. Light reveals the solidity and weight of the people and objects in Phil’s paintings. Likewise, the light gives presence to a wall, the floor or doors in the interior spaces that we’ve come to know well in his work. I was fortunate to be able to paint alongside Phil Geiger several years ago, and it was a joy to watch a patch of off-white turn into a shin or a few jabs of orange, beautifully abstract as mark, become light on floorboards. I only wish I was less absorbed in trying not to make a clunker of a painting myself, to watch more of his work developed in real time.
All of this is not to say that the subject matter, the things represented in the paintings, is irrelevant. It never feels as if the domestic settings or the specific street scenes are only just an excuse to lay down paint. It’s all wrapped up together. Just like with Fairfield Porter, the commonplace, even if it be a somewhat staged approximation of commonplace, becomes a laboratory for formal exploration, but it somehow remains moving, resonant to our own experiences, all without falling into either sentimentality or formal coldness. We get to know these people, experience their relationships with others in the painting, and even with the painter observing them at times. We relive their gestures in our own bodies as we look. At the same time, we trace the mark with an imaginary paint brush in hand, follow the routes through the space so thoughtfully arranged and consider the pockets of space created by the placement of carefully mixed tones side by side.
Phil’s work serves as such an inspiration to so many painters today, myself included. His dogged loyalty to motifs, particularly the figures in interiors, demonstrates the endless permutations of theme and variation that are possible in painting with certain fixed parameters. He shows us that novelty is not necessarily the best route to maintaining a long studio practice. But repeated investigations and close examinations of privately beloved themes bare surprising results over time. Sometimes all you need to do is move your easel to a different corner of the room or change the quilt on a bed to open up a whole new world. These slight variables, introduced to an intense and prolonged looking at and living within the spaces you depict, can free you to really experiment in paint.